Indy public housing residents fear gun violence

INDIANAPOLIS — Eulice Orr was asleep inside his apartment at the Indianapolis Housing Agency’s Blackburn Terrace complex at 3 a.m. Monday when he was awakened by gunfire in the 3100 block of Brouse Avenue.

”I didn’t see nothing. I don’t never get up because if you get up you’re subject to being hit by a bullet,” he said. “So it was like pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop. And then pop pop pop back.”

Bullet holes remain in the window of an abandoned apartment just up the street where a seventeen-year-old was shot.

His mother told me her son didn’t know who shot him outside of an empty unit where squatters hang out in the middle of the night, a half-block from his own apartment at Blackburn Terrace.

”You hear it all the time,” said Brouse Avenue neighbor Lori Lane Wuthrich. “For the last month, we’ve had nothing but shootings out here. And you’re scared to walk out your door.”

Four people had been shot in the same block of Brouse in August.

Lori and Eulice were hanging their laundry out to dry on a fence line outside of their apartment, where she tells her grandchildren not to go.

”Once you go past that fence over there, you’re out there in the real world,” she said, as her grandbabies are not allowed outside after 6 p.m.

It was at 6 p.m. Monday, during a different shooting incident, when neighbors reported they heard dozens of gunshots in the 3000 block of North Baltimore Avenue, leading to the front door of Blackburn Terrace. Police found bullets from four different guns on the pavement.

At Beechwood Gardens, another IHA property, the victim of an arson and burglary of her apartment over the weekend told IMPD they should be looking for a ten-year-old suspect.

Last winter, IHA fired its police force and halted the hiring of off-duty officers to patrol its properties, instead relying on infrequent IMPD visits.

“They don’t come out here anymore,” said Lori.

“What do you suppose that happened?” FOX59 asked.

“They’re scared to come out here,” she said.

Last week, IMPD made a quick arrest of a suspect in the shooting of a man at IHA’s Lugar Tower property.

Detectives still haven’t solved the murder of a teenage girl at the Laurelwood Apartments, an IHA property on the southside.

IHA is in talks to sell most of its properties to private investors.

”We have no maintenance. No management. Nobody to maintain. We don’t have anybody to maintain out here,” said Lori. “We just out here like they forgot about us.”

IHA did not respond to a request for comment regarding the neighbors’ concerns.